Technologies tend to incorporate certain safety mechanisms in order to keep things working properly but as time goes on those early additions tend to spiral out of control and may require tweaking from time to time.

Western Digital Advanced Format Technology, found in the WD10EARS, attempts to improve on drive performance while removing a good chunk of the overhead required to keep a hard drive in tip-top shape. HotHardware has the review:

Western Digital isn’t lying about the efficiency benefits of a 4K sector drive, but the company can use that space in a number of ways. Smaller platters are one option, larger storage capacity is another, and removing the innermost tracks of the platter is a third. This last contains an extra bonus—because read and write speeds are typically reported as an average, knocking off the slowest tracks would make the hard drive look  faster in a benchmark without actually changing performance at all. For now, WD isn’t claiming that Advanced Format delivers any particular advantage and AF drives aren’t carrying much of a premium, if any.

They may not claim any performance benefit but a “green” drive keeping up with the company’s performance model is impressive indeed.

Solid state drives will maintain their insanely comfortable lead when it comes to outright performance but when it comes to storage sizes we won’t be seeing anything remotely inexpensive from the technology for a good long while so you’ll have to rely on some form of mechanical storage in the meantime.

The new Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB crams in an ample amount of storage space and still manages to eek out impressive speeds, well as impressive as such a drive can be. The Tech Report has a review:

The terabyte model’s platters have only 334GB each, so the new Black represents a substantial 50% jump in per-platter capacity. And there’s been an even more impressive boost in areal density. WD’s 334GB platters shoehorn 235 gigabits into every square inch, while the new ones boast an areal density of 400 GB/in²—an increase of 70%. Obviously, the potential performance implications of such a leap are quite exciting.

A slick drive with plenty of storage space and speedy enough for plenty of tasks.

Storage drives are getting all sorts of fine tuning for the green segment. While a single hard drive might not consume the sort of power that would change things dramatically the amount of power saved across a RAID array of such drives could be impressive.

Legit Reviews has a look at the Western Digital 2TB Caviar green and black drives one of which promises to sip power while the other goes for all out performance. Here’s a look:

The WD Caviar Green 2 TB drive might not shine in the performance benchmarks, but it does shine in other areas like power consumption, heat and noise levels. It uses 4-5 Watts less power while completing seek operations and our testing showed that it was also 6C to 9C cooler depending on the state of the drive.  This makes the Caviar Green 2 TB drive the ideal choice for energy-conscious customers or for those that are building a system in a chassis that doesn’t have good airflow.

Performance or power savings and cooler operating temperatures, decisions decisions.

Notebooks had been lagging desktops in storage capacit for quite a while barely storing as much data as the modern road warrior needs in order to get things done. That’s no longer the case as The Tech Report has a look at 5 2.5″ hard drives each capable of storing 500GB of information, plenty to hold all of your work and some of your entertainment.

Here’s a peek:

As you’ve surely noticed, we have two drives from Seagate. That’s
because the Momentus manufacturer is the only drive maker currently
selling 500GB notebook drives at both 5,400 and 7,200 RPM. Spindle
speed counts for a lot with mechanical storage, giving the Momentus
7200.4 a significant advantage right out of the gate. The fact that the
7200.4 also features 16MB of onboard cache memory–twice what’s
available from the rest of the field–certainly raises our performance
expectations for the drive. It also raises the question of why other
manufacturers haven’t bumped their drives up to 16MB. They may be
sticking to 8MB at 5,400 RPM to further differentiate future 7,200-RPM
models.

A nice batch of drives, but we’re still (patiently) waiting on inexpensive solid state drives here.

Since the advent of external USB storage devices, it’s been extremely easy to add storage to your computer without all of the popping open your case and cramming in the hard drive nonsense.

Western Digital’s My Book Essential Edition 1TB USB 2.0 external hard drive promises a good chunk of extra space at an extremely tempting price. There was a point in time where an external drive would set you back more than your run of the mill internal version but that price premium has slowly shrunk down to an acceptable profit-taking level.

The company touts the drive as a little eco-friendlier with up to 30% more energy efficiency than standard systems, which I take to mean competing brands that offer the same storage space using the same USB 2.0 interface.

Click the break for our full review.

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